Three Stories: The Throat, Without Mercy, Still Life - June 7, 1992
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Sorry for the pause last week. I just started a new job after three months of unemployment, something that was great for my writing but horrible for the finances of my household, and as I’ve been aging my body takes a harder time doing 8 hours of service work a day. It’s also a full-time job rather than the part time I’d been doing before, at least for a bit while I get our finances back in order. So, here are some archival stories while I continue to work on new material.
The first is a short story called “The Throat”, an exercise in polyperspective inspired by Chris Ware’s Building Stories as well as the Spanish civil war-era novel The Hive by Camilo Jose Cera. The second, “Without Mercy”, is a sex scene exploring depravity. I’ve been frustrated by the neo-puritanical urge even as it reaches the shores of transgressive art. It’s not that I want shock factor as much as to paint the real flesh of the world, including its ugliness. The final story, “Still Life - June 7, 1992”, is part of a series of still lives I’ve been writing over time, efforts to capture an image of a moment like a painter. I’ve been trying to push myself toward evocative stillness for a while. I feel soon it will be time to focus on present action again.
The Throat
Below me comes a gagging. I have my window open; it is summer. Warm air filters into my home and, should I close my eyes, I feel nearly as though I am flying. I am alone. The door is closed but within my mind it is ajar. I can nearly nudge it open, nearly, hear the sound beyond the jamb, the shuffling of feet, the squeaking of boards and springs, the perennial thump of banda from my neighbors, who never speak and always drink but smile at me from their balcony as I pass through the courtyard toward my car. The furniture melts below my body. I am in a river. A fish. Bug-eyed and wriggling.
*
He grips his throat. Asphalt and the edge of the dumpster pressing like shoulders on the metro into his body. He had presumed, blood trickling through the cracks of his fingers pressed to the wound, that he would have felt warmth, like fading into a sea. No. Everything is hard and sterile. He can feel the dirt beneath his jeans still. The crude outline of the man pressing against his chest still, knife clutched in the other hand, refuses to lose full sharpness. Gargling and gagging. No money even. His face hurts from smiling. The involuntary rictus. He moves his lips, but it’s just spitting now.
*
Chirp. Chirp chirp chirp chirp. Chirp chirp. Chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp.
*
Alcohol passes my lips. Sweet cerveza, crisp like champagne. It’s cheap, but it’s ice cold, and light, and the summer heat pummels my exposed body in this shitty apartment, with its thin walls and broken air. A gagging from beyond the window. A neighbor probably, half drunk like me, escaping. No worries. I turn the stereo up. Have peace, brother. Banda groans and hums through my apartment; with eyes closed, I am transported back to jungles and oceans, deserts and cities, the trees and the flowers, cinnamon and chocolate, the scent of corn and sugar and roasting pork. I have to be up at 4 fucking AM tomorrow. Somewhere in my head, I know my upstairs neighbor will call the police again for a noise complaint. I smile at him every day as he walks to his car. Prick. The beer vibrates me and the sweat beading on my belly and scalp feel briefly like the ocean. The gagging stops.
*
My car stutters to a stop. The brakes grind and grumble beneath my feet; $1500 dollars of repairs in the shop and it still doesn’t fucking drive right. I should beat his skull in with a wrench is what I should do. My chassis rattles with the hip-hop drone of low bass and percussion hits like cannonades, but that’s deliberate. Sun glancing through cloud cover and the jutting angularity of cold rooftops like an enemy sniper. Shit, I’m never getting over it, am I? Two men, or I think men, in my periphery: can’t help but clock them. Don’t turn my head. One leaned over the other, whispering something. Lovers? He clutches his chest, mumbles something back. Whatever. Got a gay cousin. It’s whatever. Get you yours.
*
Tssktssktssktssk. Sneeeeeeee. Tssktssk.
*
From above, they're not even ants. That's a myth. Clouds crack across the hull of the ship and through their wisp, I glance down through the buzzing propellers to see the trickling beads and wooden architecture of the city, like a children's playset. Metal and glass become plastic sheets slotted into place on the playmat. There's so much life down there. Fucking and killing, a cop shoots a kid and a teacher gets an award. Leave philosophy to the philosophers though. I'm up in the air. I'm a bird, wreathed in metal, gleaming and free. I blink my eyes at the emergence of the sun. There is no pain.
*
I grab, I yank, the knife isn't supposed to do anything, he twists his body, I'm petting his throat like a baby animal, shhh shhh, slurring voices. A game.
Because I wanted to. Because I wanted to. Because I wanted to.
Like a murmuration of doves in the chest. So frantic I’m scared if my lips part feathers will vomit forth, spittle and down dripping down my throat like blood down his. Above me, banda plays from an open window. Heat crackles along my skin. I do not close my eyes. I pray in a different way.
Without Mercy
She takes his cock into her mouth. He leans his head back, puts his wife out of mind. Her scent haunts the room in stained windows and the dust-slashed vanity in the corner, her mother’s mother’s, old wood and the scent of lemon and astringent. She too tries not to think of her husband, unaware, tired but restless, without sleep, not in their home or any known place. Her ass is in the air, red panties gripping her ample hips. He can’t keep his eyes off of their sway. Takes her hair in his hand as she sucks him, runs her tongue along the length, feral and panting, half-mad. Hips clench. He cums.
He can see his wife’s faceless head swimming behind his eyes, a shadow in the shape of a woman. He wipes his cock on the sheets and silences his phone. She lifts her head from his lap, grips her hungry cunt, thick in the heat. Her chest drags against the sheets; she cannot meet his gaze. No matter. He stares out the window, reaches for the Valium on the nightstand. Decided to solace his freezing heart with her warm body. The fingers sliding beneath the waistband of her red panties, like blood splashed on the bed, lips against cheeks then lips then tongue, her breast filling his hand. She moans into his mouth: inside her mind, her husband disintegrates, blown apart, shredded to gore by bombs and gunfire, left stripped and dead in a field. His cock twitches back to life in her soft palm.
Without thought, without mercy, he slides the band down her hips, ample and full, tilting as his palm shifts across her, as much to assist him as in electric libidinal response, to press the hungry mouth of her slick and yearning pussy toward his twitching member, a marriage of heats dissolving two. In his shared bed, her so far from her husband, absent and invisible. Like a finger drawn across lips before sinking full into the throat. The ringed edge of your galaxies recede and in that cornucopia of lust he erases the name of his wife in the heat of wet flesh and old starlight. She feels his fingers dig into her ass, his lips across hers. Her husband has not in years felt her juices drip like candle wax down his length, nor she the thrum of another’s blood pumping inside of her. A camera on the dresser, documenting. The flicker of shutters and the silence of modern cameras recording. A lacerating documents. Nails driven under the skin. She gasps, clenches, grinds herself into him.
Her flowing waters, and his now too, enjoined in that marriage bed. She wears his wife’s ring, her bridal bustier, which strains under her size. They foam like dog’s lips, hydrophobic and incensed. He presses her leg back, thigh against her chest, rams deep. His teeth on her throat. She tilts her hips toward the camera, mocking, the evil on her face obscured by his panting head as she plays for the camera the catch of his seed inside of her. The sight of his bare flesh plunging mad a confirmation of the boundlessness of their cruelty. His wife has not born him a child; this woman will. Her husband will watch the tape. Behind funeral masks. Without mercy.
Still Life - June 7, 1992
The chip in the blue wall the size of a child’s fist. Always wet, with something, until you touch. Your fingers find the sharpness and its depth like gripping a vulva, involuntary, a toddler’s response to the desires of the hand. Slashes of stomped cigarette butts against the dark blue tiles, like ships dotting a vibrant northern sea. The whitecaps in stone striation across the floor, a calligraphy, the poetry of Poseidon written across those frozen tiled waves. The pale green paint which covers the pockmarked wall, scuffed by teenage shoulders and cheap end tables, the drunkards of the stairwell stumbling over half-tied shoes and the ridged rise of the rubberized edge of the stairs, always caked with the day’s dust. The stairwell always smells of weed, of rain, of cheap beer, bottles of Modelo some full and some empty arranged like Stonehenge across the landing, propped against the railing, tumbling toward corners and baseboards.
The Nordic light slants through the tall rectangular windows like rods from heaven, paints in straight clean lines the brightness and the dark, the summer and the sea. The air shifts: light warms Carolina yellow before settling to something cooler. The scent of your mother’s iced tea on your fingers. The plastic jug, its yellow plastic lid, the flowers painted on its edges and the pour spout with a chip you have to mind lest you dribble the sun-brewed nectar upon the table and the counter. She hasn’t spoken to you in 12 years; she’s been dead for eight. Still that scent on your fingers. You lift a cigarette to your lips, inhale, and there it is again, fresh and real, your small legs and stubby arms unable to reach up to the counter to grip the base of the jug, memories of the tidal flash of tea as the old lid came loose and her stern words. That flash of anger which belied no love: love, which you had to remember even then, to infer, unstated, overlay like a painter over her dog-like snapping and the foam at the edge of her lips, the prefiguring of her sickness.
You see teenagers fucking in the stairwell against the window, panting like animals, hands at each other’s throats, their pants bunched rough below the thigh. That reckless abandonment: self to self, against world. Pouring into. You look away, ignore the breathy cries. Club dressed and backwards hats, the music from their phone speakers clanging like tin bells against the high ceiling and the heavy metal doors.
Mail clusters like ferns and moss along the baseboards of the bottom floor, maps of being, parking tickets, eviction notices, direct mail coupons and legal threats to old tenants, the missing letter from home, insurance cards and trial credit cards, the envelopes covered in pictures human teeth within human faces, a dentist’s accidentally terrifying polemic, a sacral vow for dental health upon the passion of the bleeding tooth and the inflamed scourged gums. Summer steams the windows and winter bites through your gray sweater to the bone. Light shifts like the fabric of so many dresses spun on their circle rack and you, lost at the center, tittering like a mad mouse as your mother frantic searches for you, smelling of tea.